A glorious synthesis and extension of your ideas. I devoured this article. The implications are where this really gets the heart racing. This feels like the foundation for a resynthesis of science and religion, just what humanity needs to burst into a new post-reductionist era.
Thank you Shane. Yes, I think this approach can potentially end much of the conflict between science and religion. A highly evolved universe, travelling along a developmental path that is fine-tuned to produce intelligent life, is explicable in terms of science, while fulfilling many of the functions of a religious belief system. I keep returning to that old quote of Teilhard de Chardin, "The universe is God coming into being."
Stellar work! You've not only made a daring rush at the truth, unsupported by conventional credentials, but given us all a great deal of fun in the process. You might be right, too, of course, and justly win universal praise.
As you continue to explore the rich theme of the Eggiverse, give a thought to the possibility that the universe has been (super-)naturally selected to reproduce with the help of human agency. Reëcreational Theology embraces that hypothesis and from it makes an argument for having s*x (like biological sex but moreso) with the universe; see: https://t0morrow.substack.com/
Congratulations; you're well on your way to sainthood in the first real science of theology.
Thank you, I think! If evolutionary cosmology gains traction, I do think there will be an extraordinarily fertile conversation between science and religion. The boundaries will get very blurred. (And I suspect there will be a great deal of resistance to that, from both the science and religion sides.)
The idea of early black hole formation driving later star and galaxy formation a great idea, but I can't think of any reason you need to bring in evolution. If you haul in evolution, you have to come up with a mechanism that preserves some of the laws of physics across the creation of a new one while allowing others to vary. Darwin could at least start out with the empirical fact of heredity. New organisms largely resemble their parent organisms. We have nothing like this with regard to universe formation.
This is especially problematic since the whole evolutionary idea is unnecessary. Why not just invoke the anthropic principle? Here we are debating this. That's an empirical fact. Why haul in so much extraneous complexity. Why deal with annoyed evolutionary biologists who have their own philosophical concerns? There's an awful lot of teleology here. We don't know how new universes are formed, and almost by definition we can't know much about them.
It makes much more sense to develop a theory that explains our universe without bonus mysticism, and it looks like you have a good one here. I don't see how it benefits from introducing failed universes and the possibility of super-universes and the like. It offers a good framework for addressing the early galaxy problem, the voids and filaments problem and, for all I know, the rotation curve problem.
P.S. In N-body research, there's a common pattern of increasingly tightly coupled subsystems with their angular momentum dissipated by overall system expansion. This fits very well with that. Complexity develops from the basic mathematics of gravitational attraction in an expanding universe. I took most of The Janus Point with a grain of salt, but I suspect the discussion of the N-body problem is at least aligned.
I really like the cosmological part, seems like a neat solution to many important problems. Nice work!
But I am not convinced at all by the evolutionary part:
1. I don't think it can be tested unless we can observe our child-universes or parent-universe, which we cannot, by definition.
2. To have evolution we need reproduction, which we have here, but also some competition for resources. Do universes compete for something among themselves? In an evolutionary theory I would like to see a conclusion that in the long run there are no universes not optimized for survival. Without that we can only say that our universe is more probable than a universe which cannot harbor us, but that's not super interesting.
3. It is unecessary to make cosmological part work. I suppose they fit nicely together, but if cosmological part explains observations and gives correct predictions it does so regardless of a reason for our universe's starting conditions.
2. That’s what I was thinking. If the reproductive cost is zero, per the article, and given that time is an in-universe constraint rather than existing outside of it, then there is no selection for or against different levels of black hole optimization. They should all produce equal amounts over ‘time’, if my logic is on track here.
Moreover, if our own universe is the spawn of a black hole that presumably was produced by a technological civilization to use for energy, wouldn’t we see the effects somewhere of extra mass from outside the universe being fed into ours to use for energy on their side?
And as someone else pointed out above, if black holes can disappear over time from emitting hawking radiation, what are the in-universe implications for this?
At any rate, this article is very interesting and I love his critiques of the mainstream theory and reasons behind it. Personally, I think that reality tends to be more interesting than whatever story we come up with to draw meaning from it, which is why his theory seems (to me anyway) to lose momentum when he gets into the cosmological and more speculative section.
Cool theory, love it. Unlikely as it appears, it would be really funny if a major branch of physics ended up disrupted by a complete outsider's theory formulated in qualitative (non-math) language.
I remember reading that S. Hawking more or less proved that black holes radiate energy, so that smaller ones can end up vanishing entirely. How does that fit with your theory, or Smolin's? If the creation of a black hole also creates a universe, what happens to that universe when the black hole vanishes?
Excellent stuff Julian! It’s exciting to see all your thoughts and insights so fully laid out. And good riddance to dark matter :)
I do think this is the foundational truth of our type of universe. I think for anyone for whom the Nick Bostrum argument strikes a chord (in the supposition that if a certain type of universe mathematically dominates/outnumbers another, that’s the one we are likely to experience), that cosmological natural selection should be orders of magnitude more impactful and more innate.
I’m extremely impressed with the blowtorch concept and the testable predictions you make (something that seems to be too foreboding to those squarely in academia doing research), and I’m excited to see them bear out.
The two things I’d personally think about/would love to hear your arguments about:
1. why black hole drives/reactors over matter-antimatter annihilation drives (I guess: is it truly theoretically maximally efficient to use black holes over whatever loss would be evolved in the precursor or capture steps to matter-antimatter annihilation). Is there something there about the lack of antimatter in the early universe that the theory also illuminates? Perhaps that antimatter was never created, or just the more obvious statement that such a universe with lots of initial annihilation would not have reproduced/made black holes well so we don’t find ourselves in one. [Perhaps this should be an additional postulate you volunteer: matter-anti-matter annihilation as a power generator will never be as efficient as black holes well drives.?]
2. We spoke about this at some point, but how does the local vs global maxima come into play from a cardinality/degree of infinity and reproduction standpoint.
Also from a SETI mindset, are there any technosignatures of Everest size black hole drives we could hope to see? I understand you are trying to straddle the line between mainstream (ie non “woo woo”) enough to be considered by “serious” scientific minds, but an obvious unstated (or maybe merely hinted at) part of the 3rd wave of black holes is ubiquitous intelligence. Maybe that can be saved for when you’ve hit the mainstream :)
Amazing stuff and I will be sure to share! I think Event Horizon with John Michael Godier would be an excellent place to be interviewed. Event horizons: https://youtube.com/@eventhorizonshow?si=X6Ow0eI7HX3UIkjA and his more short form channel: https://youtube.com/@johnmichaelgodier?si=3NR108ux0EMLtEGX are both very fascinating and he’s very open to new theories. His shorter form channel had a video uploaded yesterday regarding the evidence that our universe is inside a spinning black hole that is relevant, and he gets on serious people for event horizon. You’d make an excellent guest and he has had numerous videos touching on cosmological natural selection. I will comment on his latest video regarding this post and bringing you on.
Amazing stuff and can’t wait to keep following this. Here’s to hoping this borders on consensus in the next 15 years!
First, this is fantastic. I found Smolin's book three years ago, when Covid gave me time and motivation to think about why the universe exists. The concept forms its own gravitational well that sucks in those of us who share the instinct that dark matter is not delivering on its initial promise. I am grateful you are doing this project, and building a community of people crazy enough to take it seriously.
I want to get feedback on a related theory that shepherds the universe to the exact same fine-tuned constants as your and Smolin's evolution, but without going through trial and error phase. I would really like your reaction. (Yes, the theory is mine, and yes I also have no formal background to support the notion that I can generate a useful theory here. So it goes. I've been sitting on this for a while, without a community to test it on, so again, huge thanks for having the courage to start publishing on line here.)
The endpoint is trillions of technologically-produced black holes. And the mechanism is that while you are positing we get there by sampling potential futures in series (one at a time, through evolution), I think we get to the same place by sampling potential futures in parallel.
Here is how.
Rather than arrive at the end state of intelligent life through cycles of trial and error (black hole birth and universe creation), we can instead posit the following: (a) the physical constants of the universe could be something else (other than what we see, which are weirdly fined tuned for life); (b) those constants are actually variables at sufficiently high energy, like at the moment of the Big Bang; (c) the constants physically freeze into place as the universe cools; (d) this freezing is really an annealing process; and (e) the path that leads to the most rapid cooling is the one that gets frozen in. That's it. If you assume that, you find yourself on a path to intelligent life.
Why? One weird property of life is that it accelerates the creation of entropy. Life is good at finding pockets of energy, consuming that energy to create more life, and releasing low grade heat as a byproduct. Intelligent life is theoretically even more efficient at this than run-of-the-mill life. As you point out, black hole formation is the ultimate way of converting energy to entropy. So a theory that says "black hole formation is reproductive" and one that says "black hole formation is maximally energy dissipating, and the universe will go down the path that cools most quickly" end up in exactly the same place at the end.
The reason I like this theory, even after reading yours and Smolin's, is that the mechanism for fine-tuning isn't reliant on a random walk. It does require one large, uncomfortable leap: the annealing process has to be impacted by events that occur far in the future, after those constants have been fixed (e.g., the constants forming at/near the Big Bang has to somehow be influence by the ability to form life billions of years later). Smolin's theory allows the universe to sampling possible states through a random walk. This idea instead posits an anneal process that samples possible future universe through what is probably a uncollapsed quantum state that encompasses future times. If you think about it long enough, the anneal process requires some degree of retrocausality, which not exactly a great place to be. But also we have really had trouble figuring out how time actually works in physics, there are versions of retrocausality in quantum theory that are not entirely nuts, and, well, at some point we know that some laws of physics need to be rethought for the universe to make sense. I vote for this one, but understand that's a matter of taste.
I think that everything else you predict would hold for an annealed system vs an evolved one. Again, the only difference is evolution samples future states in series, while the anneal samples in parallel.
I would love comment, feedback, and conversation. Thanks again.
I wanted to specifically compliment you on how well you are able to distill an extremely esoteric and complicated set of theoretical/observational data into a well argued, coherent essay supporting your ideas. IMO not enough people understand how truly rare it is for someone to 1) even have the capacity to understand the frontiers of something such as cosmology and 2) understand this well enough to communicate it to a lay audience through a medium which is graspable. I'm a genetic counselor, so my work is analogously to translate evolution/mendelian risks to everyday people in such as a way that they can make informed decisions about things that affect their lives and that of their offspring. If you think the services of someone such as me might eventually be of use to you, let's chat more, or perhaps downstream...
One specific question if you get around to a reply: If I understood you, directly observing the EM radation from these large filaments in relation to the direct-collapse SMBHs is difficult to do because so much time has passed that these orientations in space have morphed over gajillions of years to make those relationships hard to appreciate. I'm wondering if that is also true of the large filaments that should have the North/South orientation to the SMBHs. eg. is it possible to predict, observe, and confirm if at the ends of these large filaments there are appropriately positioned SMBHs, or is this too Laplace's Demon-y to say "the angular tilty-ness of the SMBHs aligns with the direction of their massive quasar output and is what created the filament architecture we see today"?
I suggest you look into black hole electrons, an old hypothesis that fell out of favor mostly because nobody could figure out how to test it, because I think you may be grossly underestimating the number of black holes involved.
Because it seems to me that the theory predicts something else: Every particle that can be made out of a black hole, will be made out of a black hole.
Aaaaargh! Yes, black hole electrons are an alarming possibility. Thanks for reminding me, I won't sleep tonight now...
No, I don't go there, because as you say, it seems untestable right now. And of course there are also the disturbing parallels between protons and black holes...
But again, I'm not qualified to wade into such deep water. I will stick to my modest task of explaining material reality at the macro scale in terms of evolution of universes...
A glorious synthesis and extension of your ideas. I devoured this article. The implications are where this really gets the heart racing. This feels like the foundation for a resynthesis of science and religion, just what humanity needs to burst into a new post-reductionist era.
Thank you Shane. Yes, I think this approach can potentially end much of the conflict between science and religion. A highly evolved universe, travelling along a developmental path that is fine-tuned to produce intelligent life, is explicable in terms of science, while fulfilling many of the functions of a religious belief system. I keep returning to that old quote of Teilhard de Chardin, "The universe is God coming into being."
Wanted, skilled plaster repair technician.
Stellar work! You've not only made a daring rush at the truth, unsupported by conventional credentials, but given us all a great deal of fun in the process. You might be right, too, of course, and justly win universal praise.
As you continue to explore the rich theme of the Eggiverse, give a thought to the possibility that the universe has been (super-)naturally selected to reproduce with the help of human agency. Reëcreational Theology embraces that hypothesis and from it makes an argument for having s*x (like biological sex but moreso) with the universe; see: https://t0morrow.substack.com/
Congratulations; you're well on your way to sainthood in the first real science of theology.
Thank you, I think! If evolutionary cosmology gains traction, I do think there will be an extraordinarily fertile conversation between science and religion. The boundaries will get very blurred. (And I suspect there will be a great deal of resistance to that, from both the science and religion sides.)
The idea of early black hole formation driving later star and galaxy formation a great idea, but I can't think of any reason you need to bring in evolution. If you haul in evolution, you have to come up with a mechanism that preserves some of the laws of physics across the creation of a new one while allowing others to vary. Darwin could at least start out with the empirical fact of heredity. New organisms largely resemble their parent organisms. We have nothing like this with regard to universe formation.
This is especially problematic since the whole evolutionary idea is unnecessary. Why not just invoke the anthropic principle? Here we are debating this. That's an empirical fact. Why haul in so much extraneous complexity. Why deal with annoyed evolutionary biologists who have their own philosophical concerns? There's an awful lot of teleology here. We don't know how new universes are formed, and almost by definition we can't know much about them.
It makes much more sense to develop a theory that explains our universe without bonus mysticism, and it looks like you have a good one here. I don't see how it benefits from introducing failed universes and the possibility of super-universes and the like. It offers a good framework for addressing the early galaxy problem, the voids and filaments problem and, for all I know, the rotation curve problem.
P.S. In N-body research, there's a common pattern of increasingly tightly coupled subsystems with their angular momentum dissipated by overall system expansion. This fits very well with that. Complexity develops from the basic mathematics of gravitational attraction in an expanding universe. I took most of The Janus Point with a grain of salt, but I suspect the discussion of the N-body problem is at least aligned.
I really like the cosmological part, seems like a neat solution to many important problems. Nice work!
But I am not convinced at all by the evolutionary part:
1. I don't think it can be tested unless we can observe our child-universes or parent-universe, which we cannot, by definition.
2. To have evolution we need reproduction, which we have here, but also some competition for resources. Do universes compete for something among themselves? In an evolutionary theory I would like to see a conclusion that in the long run there are no universes not optimized for survival. Without that we can only say that our universe is more probable than a universe which cannot harbor us, but that's not super interesting.
3. It is unecessary to make cosmological part work. I suppose they fit nicely together, but if cosmological part explains observations and gives correct predictions it does so regardless of a reason for our universe's starting conditions.
2. That’s what I was thinking. If the reproductive cost is zero, per the article, and given that time is an in-universe constraint rather than existing outside of it, then there is no selection for or against different levels of black hole optimization. They should all produce equal amounts over ‘time’, if my logic is on track here.
Moreover, if our own universe is the spawn of a black hole that presumably was produced by a technological civilization to use for energy, wouldn’t we see the effects somewhere of extra mass from outside the universe being fed into ours to use for energy on their side?
And as someone else pointed out above, if black holes can disappear over time from emitting hawking radiation, what are the in-universe implications for this?
At any rate, this article is very interesting and I love his critiques of the mainstream theory and reasons behind it. Personally, I think that reality tends to be more interesting than whatever story we come up with to draw meaning from it, which is why his theory seems (to me anyway) to lose momentum when he gets into the cosmological and more speculative section.
Cool theory, love it. Unlikely as it appears, it would be really funny if a major branch of physics ended up disrupted by a complete outsider's theory formulated in qualitative (non-math) language.
I remember reading that S. Hawking more or less proved that black holes radiate energy, so that smaller ones can end up vanishing entirely. How does that fit with your theory, or Smolin's? If the creation of a black hole also creates a universe, what happens to that universe when the black hole vanishes?
Excellent stuff Julian! It’s exciting to see all your thoughts and insights so fully laid out. And good riddance to dark matter :)
I do think this is the foundational truth of our type of universe. I think for anyone for whom the Nick Bostrum argument strikes a chord (in the supposition that if a certain type of universe mathematically dominates/outnumbers another, that’s the one we are likely to experience), that cosmological natural selection should be orders of magnitude more impactful and more innate.
I’m extremely impressed with the blowtorch concept and the testable predictions you make (something that seems to be too foreboding to those squarely in academia doing research), and I’m excited to see them bear out.
The two things I’d personally think about/would love to hear your arguments about:
1. why black hole drives/reactors over matter-antimatter annihilation drives (I guess: is it truly theoretically maximally efficient to use black holes over whatever loss would be evolved in the precursor or capture steps to matter-antimatter annihilation). Is there something there about the lack of antimatter in the early universe that the theory also illuminates? Perhaps that antimatter was never created, or just the more obvious statement that such a universe with lots of initial annihilation would not have reproduced/made black holes well so we don’t find ourselves in one. [Perhaps this should be an additional postulate you volunteer: matter-anti-matter annihilation as a power generator will never be as efficient as black holes well drives.?]
2. We spoke about this at some point, but how does the local vs global maxima come into play from a cardinality/degree of infinity and reproduction standpoint.
Also from a SETI mindset, are there any technosignatures of Everest size black hole drives we could hope to see? I understand you are trying to straddle the line between mainstream (ie non “woo woo”) enough to be considered by “serious” scientific minds, but an obvious unstated (or maybe merely hinted at) part of the 3rd wave of black holes is ubiquitous intelligence. Maybe that can be saved for when you’ve hit the mainstream :)
Amazing stuff and I will be sure to share! I think Event Horizon with John Michael Godier would be an excellent place to be interviewed. Event horizons: https://youtube.com/@eventhorizonshow?si=X6Ow0eI7HX3UIkjA and his more short form channel: https://youtube.com/@johnmichaelgodier?si=3NR108ux0EMLtEGX are both very fascinating and he’s very open to new theories. His shorter form channel had a video uploaded yesterday regarding the evidence that our universe is inside a spinning black hole that is relevant, and he gets on serious people for event horizon. You’d make an excellent guest and he has had numerous videos touching on cosmological natural selection. I will comment on his latest video regarding this post and bringing you on.
Amazing stuff and can’t wait to keep following this. Here’s to hoping this borders on consensus in the next 15 years!
First, this is fantastic. I found Smolin's book three years ago, when Covid gave me time and motivation to think about why the universe exists. The concept forms its own gravitational well that sucks in those of us who share the instinct that dark matter is not delivering on its initial promise. I am grateful you are doing this project, and building a community of people crazy enough to take it seriously.
I want to get feedback on a related theory that shepherds the universe to the exact same fine-tuned constants as your and Smolin's evolution, but without going through trial and error phase. I would really like your reaction. (Yes, the theory is mine, and yes I also have no formal background to support the notion that I can generate a useful theory here. So it goes. I've been sitting on this for a while, without a community to test it on, so again, huge thanks for having the courage to start publishing on line here.)
The endpoint is trillions of technologically-produced black holes. And the mechanism is that while you are positing we get there by sampling potential futures in series (one at a time, through evolution), I think we get to the same place by sampling potential futures in parallel.
Here is how.
Rather than arrive at the end state of intelligent life through cycles of trial and error (black hole birth and universe creation), we can instead posit the following: (a) the physical constants of the universe could be something else (other than what we see, which are weirdly fined tuned for life); (b) those constants are actually variables at sufficiently high energy, like at the moment of the Big Bang; (c) the constants physically freeze into place as the universe cools; (d) this freezing is really an annealing process; and (e) the path that leads to the most rapid cooling is the one that gets frozen in. That's it. If you assume that, you find yourself on a path to intelligent life.
Why? One weird property of life is that it accelerates the creation of entropy. Life is good at finding pockets of energy, consuming that energy to create more life, and releasing low grade heat as a byproduct. Intelligent life is theoretically even more efficient at this than run-of-the-mill life. As you point out, black hole formation is the ultimate way of converting energy to entropy. So a theory that says "black hole formation is reproductive" and one that says "black hole formation is maximally energy dissipating, and the universe will go down the path that cools most quickly" end up in exactly the same place at the end.
The reason I like this theory, even after reading yours and Smolin's, is that the mechanism for fine-tuning isn't reliant on a random walk. It does require one large, uncomfortable leap: the annealing process has to be impacted by events that occur far in the future, after those constants have been fixed (e.g., the constants forming at/near the Big Bang has to somehow be influence by the ability to form life billions of years later). Smolin's theory allows the universe to sampling possible states through a random walk. This idea instead posits an anneal process that samples possible future universe through what is probably a uncollapsed quantum state that encompasses future times. If you think about it long enough, the anneal process requires some degree of retrocausality, which not exactly a great place to be. But also we have really had trouble figuring out how time actually works in physics, there are versions of retrocausality in quantum theory that are not entirely nuts, and, well, at some point we know that some laws of physics need to be rethought for the universe to make sense. I vote for this one, but understand that's a matter of taste.
I think that everything else you predict would hold for an annealed system vs an evolved one. Again, the only difference is evolution samples future states in series, while the anneal samples in parallel.
I would love comment, feedback, and conversation. Thanks again.
I wanted to specifically compliment you on how well you are able to distill an extremely esoteric and complicated set of theoretical/observational data into a well argued, coherent essay supporting your ideas. IMO not enough people understand how truly rare it is for someone to 1) even have the capacity to understand the frontiers of something such as cosmology and 2) understand this well enough to communicate it to a lay audience through a medium which is graspable. I'm a genetic counselor, so my work is analogously to translate evolution/mendelian risks to everyday people in such as a way that they can make informed decisions about things that affect their lives and that of their offspring. If you think the services of someone such as me might eventually be of use to you, let's chat more, or perhaps downstream...
One specific question if you get around to a reply: If I understood you, directly observing the EM radation from these large filaments in relation to the direct-collapse SMBHs is difficult to do because so much time has passed that these orientations in space have morphed over gajillions of years to make those relationships hard to appreciate. I'm wondering if that is also true of the large filaments that should have the North/South orientation to the SMBHs. eg. is it possible to predict, observe, and confirm if at the ends of these large filaments there are appropriately positioned SMBHs, or is this too Laplace's Demon-y to say "the angular tilty-ness of the SMBHs aligns with the direction of their massive quasar output and is what created the filament architecture we see today"?
I suggest you look into black hole electrons, an old hypothesis that fell out of favor mostly because nobody could figure out how to test it, because I think you may be grossly underestimating the number of black holes involved.
Because it seems to me that the theory predicts something else: Every particle that can be made out of a black hole, will be made out of a black hole.
Aaaaargh! Yes, black hole electrons are an alarming possibility. Thanks for reminding me, I won't sleep tonight now...
No, I don't go there, because as you say, it seems untestable right now. And of course there are also the disturbing parallels between protons and black holes...
https://scitechdaily.com/interior-of-protons-exhibit-maximum-quantum-entanglement-may-share-common-physics-with-black-holes/
But again, I'm not qualified to wade into such deep water. I will stick to my modest task of explaining material reality at the macro scale in terms of evolution of universes...
🤯